How American Academia Supports Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

By Roqayah Chamseddine | October 16, 2025 | 9:35am

Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan

Palestine Gaza

How American Academia Supports Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

The ruins of Gaza, where Israel has mercilessly targeted universities and entire cohorts of students, has unmasked the moral bankruptcy of global academia. The structural betrayal, borne out of the modern university’s direct and indirect entanglements with capital and empire, reveals that academic institutions have largely chosen silence or complicity despite watching Palestinians face down the annihilation of their society’s intellectual and educational life. The two-year onslaught has reduced whole neighborhoods and essential public institutions to rubble, killed an untold number of Palestinians, displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza, and left basic infrastructure in ruins. Independent reporting and local accounting place the Palestinian death toll somewhere as high as 600,000, and yet in the face of such staggering devastation, global academia has largely responded by refusing to name the perpetrators behind this machinery of extermination, while also maintaining bloody partnerships with companies and organizations that are directly implicated in this genocide.

Since the start of Israel’s recent ethnic cleansing campaign, the suppression of Palestinian solidarity has been systemic; students have been suspended, faculty investigated, and campus encampments have been dismantled under the pretext of “safety” concerns. Legal scholars have documented how university administrations have weaponized disciplinary codes to throttle dissent, creating what’s been described as a culture of preemptive obedience to state and donor pressure. U.S. professors have been investigated or disciplined for taking part in interviews, social media posts, or even lecturing on Gaza, revealing how university administrators have become enforcers or censors despite this kind of speech falling into the traditional remit of academic freedom. What are arguably ordinary acts of solidarity and free expression are now being met with institutional punishment, exposing deep-seated ideological policing. Research institutions that once boasted of so-called ethical commitments now maintain partnerships with weapons manufacturers, surveillance firms, and Israeli universities that are taking part in upholding the infrastructure of occupation, from Gaza to Jenin, and beyond.

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Our modern universities, which are entirely saturated with capital, have chosen the side of order over justice. While the people of Gaza faced down societal collapse and now struggle in the aftermath of a tenuous ceasefire, many institutions maintained alliances with systems of warfare, thereby accelerating violence and fueling the direct and indirect killing of Palestinians. In a damning report from The Anti-War Initiative, many elite universities were revealed to have been operating as conduits of genocide, underwriting the technologies of bloodshed with the very research they have long claimed is “neutral.” A striking case is Cornell University, whose complicity was unmasked, revealing that between 2023 and 2024 alone, some $180 million flowed from the U.S. and Israeli military and defense contractors into Cornell’s research programs and departments. According to the Everything Is Political report, Cornell’s partnerships include arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Israeli institutions like Technion (The Israeli Institute of Technology), confirming that these alliances aren’t just peripheral, but deeply established.

Cornell’s collaboration with Technion exposes that the university has cemented ties with Israeli state institutions that are closely enmeshed with Israel’s military and defense infrastructure. In the case of Technion, the organization participates in weapons research, the development of remote-controlled bulldozer technology like the D9 that has been used against Palestinians in Gaza, and which is also utilized to demolish Palestinian homes, and the export of military technology. In other cases, Cornell faculty have solicited direct funding from the Israeli Ministry of Defense (I.M.o.D) for nano-devices, laser systems, and metamaterials that have clear military potential; some of these funds were not even disclosed in their publications, indicating a gap between institutional accountability and public claims.

This institutional framework of complicity unmasks a microcosm of the broader betrayal of academia, demonstrating that while the people of Gaza are reeling from the loss of entire educational systems, U.S. universities are not just silent, but are materially invested in the destruction of their land and their society. The disciplinary suppression of protest and policing of speech are matched by a parallel infrastructure of research contracts and defense funding that serves as intellectual justification for further surveillance and violence. In the example of Cornell, the pretension of disinterested research that is somehow divorced from real-life consequences is contradicted by the evidence of direct military collaboration, revealing that our universities are not simply acting as channels for the expansion of knowledge, but the proliferation of death. What academia celebrates as innovation is inseparable from the framework of occupation and surveillance that suffocates the lives of not just Palestinians, but other indigenous communities in the region. When Gaza’s power grid is destroyed or their water supply is crippled, when drones are able to trace every movement made by forcibly displaced families, and when Israeli checkpoints are maintained by biometric surveillance, it is evident that the knowledge that sustains these systems often originate in the laboratories of Western universities.

By refusing to acknowledge their own role in systems of militarization and dispossession, universities are reproducing the hierarchies their overpaid academics make a living critiquing in every book, every lecture, and every keynote speech. This deepening moral abyss and betrayal of Palestinian scholarship will require not only severing military partnerships and confronting donor influence while protecting the right of students and faculty to speak without fear of repercussions, but also in rebuilding intellectual life in Gaza not as an act of charity, but as a principle of justice. From Cornell to MIT, either universities will continue to stand in the shadows of Gaza’s pain as testaments to academia’s failures, or they will rise to meet history with conscience.